Swaminathan Chandrasekaran

A badly marketed good product has better chances of success than a bad product that has been over marketed. While the former will rely on word of mouth to gain traction, the latter will just be heading towards an impending doom, faster. #productmanagement #productmarketing

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#Day20 of #30daysofPM PM’s Customer Feedback & Discovery Workflow Simplified Navigating the complexities of product management? One of the biggest challenges is understanding your customer’s true needs. Here's a human-centric approach I’ve found effective: 1. Declare Goals: Start with clarity—what do we really want to learn from our users? 2. Segment & Recruit: Target specific user groups and gather insights—automated or manual. 3. Interview & Frame: Ask open questions to identify unmet needs and issues. Stay curious, not assumptive. 4. Distill & Prioritize: Remove irrelevant info and focus on what’s most impactful for your strategy. 5. Transform & Route: Convert insights into opportunities, and relay to the right teams for action. The key takeaway? Prioritize feedback that drives the biggest impact. It's not just about listening—it's about transforming insights into actions that fuel growth. #ProductManagement #CustomerDiscovery #PMWorkflow #UserFeedback

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Creating a Symphony of User Experience: All Departments Unite 🎻🎺🎹 Product managers know user experience matters. But it’s not just about the product. It’s a well-tuned mix of teams uniting for customer satisfaction. 🤝 Let's digest the customer journey and departmental collaboration. Customer Journey Stages: 1. Awareness & Acquisition (Sales & Marketing): 💡🏷️ Sales start the fire with precise messaging. Marketing fans the flames with engaging content. Example: A project management software company highlights features and benefits, such as improved productivity. 2. Onboarding & Education (Product & Customer Success): 🚀🎓 The product team offers smooth onboarding while Customer Success provides support, addressing queries and driving product adoption. Example: After sign-up, our software company gives an intuitive design with tutorials and immediate query resolutions. 3. Engagement & Retention (Account Management & Product): 💬🎯 Account managers build relationships and identify user goals, while the product team uses data and feedback to match those goals. Example: Our software account manager understands needs and usage patterns. This feedback shapes feature development. 4. Advocacy & Loyalty (Customer Success & All Teams): 🏆💓 A satisfied customer becomes a brand advocate! All teams share in creating loyalty and user advocacy. Example: Positive reviews, new features, and success stories solidify our software company's excellent reputation. The Key Message: 🔑 No more silos! Open communication and collaboration across all teams create a harmonious user experience driving engagement, retention, and customer success. 🌐 Your thoughts on this approach are welcome! Let us know your experiences. 🗨️ #ProductManagement #CustomerSuccess #UserExperience #Collaboration #CustomerJourney

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After my previous post on writing user stories as a superpower for a PM, I have received lots of DMs mentioning this is not "strategic" enough to be labelled as a superpower. Honestly, a big part of product success requires disambiguating high level goals to working product. Somewhere, in the quest of strategy and product discovery, the good old grind of working on the details is getting lost. Its core part of product management and will never be out of fashion! #productmanagement #gettinginthedetails #keepshipping

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Product marketing is an underrated cornerstone of product management. 🗿 Without product marketing, it is incredibly hard for PMs to take their products to the right audience and convert their features into success! Read through this detailed post on product marketing in India to get a hands on approach on product marketing and super charge your contribution as a PM. PS: I run a program that can help you take your product management skills to the next level! If you are looking to upskill in PM and crack PM roles, apply for my program through the link on comments. ❤️

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⭐ Delighting our customers should be at the heart of every product manager’s mission, yet it's often misunderstood. ⭐ Many assume providing value is all about offering solutions and efficient functionalities, but true delight goes beyond fulfilling basic needs. It’s about creating experiences that resonate emotionally and stay with users long after they’ve stopped engaging with the product. Here are some insights on customer delight that we often overlook: 🌟 Surprise and Excite: Surprises that make customers pause and feel special can be just as important as solving their problems. These could be unexpected insights, personalized touches, or anticipating a need the customer hadn’t even realized. 🌟 Emotional Connection: Building a product that customers feel emotionally tied to can lead to loyalty that no marketing budget can buy. Think of the brands and products that you feel an emotional attachment to—what makes them different for you? 🌟 Consistent Value: While delightful moments are crucial, a consistent and reliable experience forms the backbone of customer delight. Can your users depend on your product to solve their problems time after time? 🌟 Feedback Loop: Embrace a continuous feedback loop with customers. Engagement is a signal, but delight is found in hearing the unfiltered truth directly from users—and acting on it. To my fellow Senior PMs: how do you integrate delight into your product strategy? Do you prioritize delightful discoveries during product development, or is it something you layer on top? Do you measure the emotional engagement of your users, or focus solely on functionality and efficiency? Customer delight isn’t merely an add-on; it’s integral to sustainability and growth. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What practices have worked for you in creating delightful product experiences? #productmanagement #customerexperience #productdesign #emotionalengagement #seniorpm #innovation

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What makes great products great is balance Balance between depth of features and breadth of features Balance between how often their PMs say yes and say no to stakeholders Balance between speed of increments and quality of increments Balance between number of problems they solve and the importance of problems they solve Balance between business needs and user needs Balance between successful and failed feature launches Balance between agility and stubborness Great products are like those Grand Slam winners in tennis who know how to win games by understanding the conditions and balancing their games according to what is required Their greatness is inherent in their ability to balance! #ProductManagement #Balance #Products

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For a lot of product work, good Product Strategies withstand test of time and remain valid for atleast 18-24 months. Good Product Managers are able to simulate various future scenarios well in advance to decent degree of confidence for future proofing the work. If you have to change your direction, redoing your strategy every 6-12 months as a team then perhaps your didn't put enough rigorous thinking to it in the first place. Am not saying we don't update our strategy baking in the latest tech/competition/user insights in that 18-24 months, but the changes should be less the 20-30% to the overall plan. #productmanagement #productstrategy

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The second day at SaaSBoomi ended with a wonderful evening at Lightspeed with Dev Khare and Ajeet Singh (Thoughtspot). Three things that stuck with me: 1. Don’t Shy Away from Big Markets: Even if giants dominate, there are pain points waiting for innovative solutions. 2. Transform Services into Products: Converting low-velocity services into high-velocity products can revolutionize efficiency and scalability. 3. Think Big: Capturing just 1% of a large market can be more impactful than owning 100% of a small one. ✌

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Maharashtra’s CM Conundrum: A Masterclass in Agile Chaos 🚀 As a Product Manager, the current Maharashtra CM scenario feels like running a sprint with all the stakeholders but no backlog grooming. Here's what we're witnessing in real time: • The Kickoff Meeting: Multiple teams with overlapping goals joined a sprint planning session… and never left. The CM user story is still in “In Progress,” with everyone adding dependencies faster than we can track. • Prioritization? What’s that? Every day feels like an emergency standup where stakeholders debate if “CM role” is a bug, feature, or epic. Decisions? Deferred till the next standup. • Delivery Timelines: Milestones have come and gone like calendar notifications—dismissed without action. Projections are now firmly in the “it’ll ship when it ships” category. • Escalations: Even the voters (end users) are saying, “Let us know when the release notes are ready.” Meanwhile, leadership continues to debate release naming conventions. As PMs, we’ve all been there—conflicting priorities, shifting requirements, and endless decision loops. The Maharashtra saga teaches us this: when clarity is absent, progress halts. Let’s hope this “CM release” soon clears QA, passes UAT, and delivers value to its users. Until then, remember: agility isn’t just about moving fast; it’s about moving smart. 📈 #ProductManagement #LeadershipLessons #AgileMethodology #Prioritization #MaharashtraUpdates #SprintGoals #ProjectManagement #HumorInWork #Teamwork #DecisionMaking #LessonsFromPolitics #ProfessionalGrowth #LinkedInCommunity Picture Credits: ANI (https://shorturl.at/hfGVC)

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Imagine you’re craving a samosa and chai in the middle of your workday. Instead of waiting for a delivery, What if it arrives quicker than your Zoom participants join the meeting? Blinkit will be launching a cafe feature (in pilot mode in select cities) delivering quick snacks. But here's the catch, could this 'samosa sprint' cannibalize Zomato’s own business? This move is a classic example of strategic cannibalization. Blinkit’s quick-delivery edge might bite into Zomato’s market share for small orders, but is this really a loss? Sometimes, sacrificing one product line helps strengthen another. After all, in today’s fast-paced world, speed and convenience rules. The takeaway? Innovate before your competition does.

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What's the most fun part of the PM role for you? For me, it has been user research partnering with the UX team. While an independent UX team is fantastic to get insights in a speedy manner, it helps to jump into customer calls, review survey responses and even analyze findings in collaboration. Partnering with UXR expands depth immensely! Some of my favorite projects in partnership with Jennifer Martinez Brown, my UXR partner were competitive analysis, digital product survey with users, second/third degree stakeholder feedback and even the occasional SWOT. Who is your UXR partner and what's your favorite project with them? #product #uxr

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Great insights in simple words. Please read it like 100 times!

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💰Do you enjoy getting rewards with every purchase you make?   Upraised structure allows me to engage more deeply with the brands I'm passionate about.🔍   In this case study, diving deep into the process of PhonePe Rewards feature. As a big believer in the power of rewards (and seeing some areas for improvement!), I'd love to share my thoughts and see if they can be helpful 💫   Please take a moment to review the attached presentation and kindly share your insights in the comments💬 Your feedback is greatly appreciated! 😊 #productmanagement #phonepe #fintech

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May this Independence Day 🇮🇳 bring independence to: 1️⃣ Product Managers from being called as project managers (argh, the pain I felt while writing) 2️⃣ Engineers from oncall 3️⃣ Marketers from high marketing costs with no conversions (btw, checkout Lemnisk) 4️⃣ Sales from never ending sales cycles and finally, the executives and leadership from asking "Yeh feature kab aayega?" Happy Independence Day, folks! #independenceday #productmanagers #engineers #oncall #marketers #sales #leadership

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Product Manager Interview - Can you talk about your experience at your current company? #TheArtofStorytelling Whenever I ask this question, I mostly get answers along the lines of - I did this and that - I improved metrics by this much - The company is in this space and it grew by this much when I was there While there is nothing wrong in talking about what you did, your impact, and the company, it is not clear enough. The interviewer cannot understand your impact clearly with these explanations. Basically, there is no impressive story here - No details about the ruins, hero entry, action/love/emotional scenes, and a powerful climax how the hero solved it all 😉 Some interviewers probe more but some move on resulting in you losing an opportunity to talk about your most recent accomplishments. So, here is a template I have developed over time that will surely make an impact: 1. What does the company or product or team do? (Add details of # of employees, revenues, etc., as required) 2. At what point did you join the company? What were their goals? 3. What is the state they are in now? 4. What is your role in taking the company from point #2 to point #3? Here is a sample: The (target market) work like this and have these (pain points). So, we developed a platform to solve them. I joined this startup as the first PM when there was an alpha product with no customers and a small team. In its current state after a few years, we have gained 100+ global giants as our customers and the team has grown 10x. As it is a startup, I played multiple roles on top of being a PM and worked closely with the Founder. Why such an answer will work?  1. As a good PM, you start with the pain points and then talk about how your solution solves them. If you are in a complicated or niche space, you should simplify this to the interviewer. The interviewer must understand this to understand your contribution. 2. Highlights - Startup, first PM, no customers, small team. It is clear that there is no escape from the responsibilities and the pressure to deliver. This adds to the context. 3. Add details as required to make the current state clear. 4. Highlights - Working with founder, multiple roles. You identify as someone who can work with stakeholders directly doing whatever is required to make the product a success. Note: 1. Have a shorter version of this story and mention that you are keeping it short specifically and would be happy to elaborate as required. 2. This template can be used when asked about work experience in general as well. If you have worked only in a couple of companies, you can repeat this template. But if you have worked in more, use this template for the top 1-2 most impactful roles after giving a summary. #productmanagement #productinterviews

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